News Round-Up: Left Wing Violence-Blood Libel Edition

We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

~ Ronald Reagan

By Gary P Jackson

It’s been a wild and crazy week, and we haven’t been able to do our normal daily news round-up from around the world this week.

There has been so many important stories about left wing violence, the blood libel against Sarah Palin, and the STRONG Jewish defense of Sarah, from both liberal and Conservative Jews, death threats against her, and the hatred spewed from the left.

The left sought to capitalize on the tragedy for political gain from the second it happened, and turned the memorial in Arizona into a marketing opportunity for Obama and the DNC, complete with t-shirts, signs, and all.

With that said, here are the many stories, announcements and editorials from the past week we simply weren’t able to comment on.

We are taking pull-quotes from some articles, for others just a link. All stories are linked, please be sure to follow the links to read the full articles.

As always, your comments on any and all are welcomed.

Ilario Pantano:

A Prayer For Congresswoman Giffords

In the wake of this devastating tragedy, please say a prayer for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her family. And please remember that one of her most recent political acts was to read a section of the Constitution of the United States: the 1st Amendment protecting among other things, the freedom of speech. That right has never been as endangered as it is today.

Let’s not be so short sighted by our grief and overwhelmed by the profound loss that we lose sight of the very rights that Rep. Giffords took an oath to defend.

As Speaker John Boehner said, “An attack on one is an attack on all.” I commend Speaker Boehner for his decision to suspend Congress and the important debates ahead so we as a nation can focus our prayers and our hopes for Rep. Giffords, Judge John Roll, and all the families impacted by this tragedy.

Would you please take a moment to send a card to her offices in Arizona and DC? Her staffers must be traumatized not only by the attack on her, but also the senseless slaughter of one of her staff members, Gabe Zimmerman.

American Thinker:

The Left, Not the Right, Owns Political Violence

We could begin over a century ago, when William McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz was inspired by anarchist Emma Goldman (today a darling of the academic feminists). Goldman’s lover, Alexander Berkman, attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick because Frick was a prominent capitalist.

But it wasn’t until the 1960s (when Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh became idols of the American left) that the left really ramped up the violence.

Who can forget Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam? Or Eldridge “rape is an insurrectionary act” Cleaver and his Black Panthers?

What about the bombings perpetrated by the Weathermen? Former Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers is, of course, a close associate of President Barack Obama. Ayers managed to escape prosecution (and proclaimed himself “[g]uilty as hell, free as a bird“), but his wife Bernadine Dohrn served jail time for her part in the violence.

Black radicals seized Cornell University at gunpoint in 1969, the same year the SDS and the Weathermen staged the “Days of Rage” riots.

Race riots took place in Watts in 1965 and nationwide in 1968; leftists rioted at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968.

John Kennedy was murdered by a communist, and Robert Kennedy was shot by a Palestinian — hardly men of the right.

The 1970s weren’t much calmer. The Army Math Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was bombed by leftist radicals in 1970.

Heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped and took part in a series of armed bank robberies by the left-wing Symbionese Liberation Army.

The SLA inspired Sarah Jane Moore to try to assassinate Gerald Ford — less than three weeks after Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a disciple of Charles Manson, tried to kill Ford also.

And what about the shooting of FBI agents at Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement in 1975?

Since we’re taking about violence against members of Congress, how can we possibly fail to mention the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan and the mass suicide of nine hundred people by the leftist/Marxist Jonestown cult in 1978?

Does anyone recall that President Clinton pardoned members of the Marxist-Leninist-inspired Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN?

Clinton also pardoned left-wing radical Susan Rosenberg, who was imprisoned for her role in the murder of two police officers and a security guard in a robbery in 1981. She was offered a teaching job at Hamilton College, but public outcry forced her to decline the position.

More recently, we’ve seen anarchist and communist riots against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, and violent anti-Bush and antiwar protests.

In 2007, leftist playwrights in New York created a stage performance about killing president Bush.

The politics of the contemporary left is absolutely intertwined with either tacit or overt support for violence. How dare the left-wing media attempt to pin the actions of a deranged individual in Tucson on the right! To do so is nothing less than a calumny, a slander, and a blatant hypocrisy.

Politicus USA:

Flashback: Keith Olbermann’s Violent Rhetoric Against Blue Dog Democrats Like Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords

You were elected to serve the people, and if you fail to pass or support this legislation the full wrath of the progressive and the moderate movements in this country will come down on your head.

Pamela Geller:

A Conspiracy Against the Mind, Against Life, Against Man and
the Virtue of Sarah Palin

Today Sarah Palin responded to the vicious blood libel leveled against her by the army of destroyers. The ferocious, relentless attacks on Sarah Palin is a testament to her greatness, proof of how deathly afraid of her they are, like Dracula to the silver cross.

Victor Davis Hanson:

The Sick Art Of Turning Insanity Into Politics

Very few Americans are fans of both The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kamp, as the Tucson killer, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, apparently was. Fewer still post on the Internet fears about “brain washing,” “mind control,” and “conscience dreaming”; have a long record of public disruption and aberrant behavior; were expelled from community college; or were summarily rejected for military service.

No matter. Almost immediately following Loughner’s cowardly murdering of six and wounding of 14 including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, pundits and some public figures rushed to locate his rampage, together with his paranoid rantings about government control, within the larger landscape of right-wing politics — especially the rhetoric of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.

The three worst offenders were Paul Daly of the New York Daily News, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, and Andrew Sullivan.

Apparently, we are supposed to believe that Loughner’s unhinged rants about the “government” indict those who express reasonable reservations about the size of government as veritable accessories to mass murder. The three worst offenders were Paul Daly of the New York Daily News, who claimed just that in an essay with the raging headline “The blood of Congresswoman Giffords was on Sarah Palin’s hands”; the ubiquitous Paul Krugman, who connected Loughner to the supposedly Republican-created “climate of hate”; and Andrew Sullivan, who thought he saw yet another avenue through which to further his own blind antipathy toward Sarah Palin and “the Palin forces.” In their warped syllogism, the Tea Party unquestionably creates hatred; a congresswomen was shot out of hatred; ergo, the Tea Party and/or the Republican party all but pulled the trigger.

That the 22-year-old shooter more likely fit the profile of an unhinged killer like Ted Kaczynski or John Hinckley did not seem to register. In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, commentators pontificated about a right-wing “climate of hate” in Dallas, Texas, that supposedly explained why a crazed avowed Communist — pro-Soviet, Castroite 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald — shot President Kennedy. Suddenly, this week, we are back in a 1963 mood of blaming politics for deranged shootings.

Byron York:

CNN fanned the flames of hostility to Gov. Palin

[Wolf] Blitzer asked, ‘is there any evidence
that the suspected shooter . . .was a Sarah Palin fan?’

Aaron Klein:

Attacks on Tea Party, Gov. Palin are baseless.

All of Jared Laugher’s known political views are left-wing.

Jake Tapper and other ‘mainstream’ journalists know this but are not reporting it.

The blame being heaped on the Tea Party movement and Gov. Sarah Palin in this connection are completely baseless.

JewsForSarah:

The Secretary and the Sheriff

JewsForSarah:

Lefty mag – Shooter’s animus pre-dates Palin’s prominence

Newsmax:

Frankin Graham Outraged Sarah Palin Linked to Shooting

Sheya:

My Statement On Blood Libel

Ann Coulter:

Liberals Seek Ban On Metaphors In Wake Of Arizona Shooting

After the monstrous shooting in Arizona last week, surely we can all agree that we’ve got to pass Obama’s agenda immediately and stop using metaphors.

At least I think that’s what the mainstream media are trying to tell me.

Liberals instantly leapt on the sickening massacre at a Tucson political event over the weekend to accuse tea partiers, Sarah Palin and all conservatives who talk out loud of being complicit in murder by inspiring the shooter, Jared Loughner

Adrienne Ross:

Jews Stand With Governor Palin’s Use Of Blood Libel

BBC World News Service:

Dr. Gina Loudon Discusses Sarah Palin

Wall Street Journal:

Rabbi Shmuley – Sarah Palin has a right to use ‘blood libel’

Despite the strong associations of the term, Sarah Palin has every right to use it.

Despite the strong association of the term with collective Jewish guilt and concomitant slaughter, Sarah Palin has every right to use it. The expression may be used whenever an amorphous mass is collectively accused of being murderers or accessories to murder.

The abominable element of the blood libel is not that it was used to accuse Jews, but that it was used to accuse innocent Jews—their innocence, rather than their Jewishness, being the operative point. Had the Jews been guilty of any of these heinous acts, the charge would not have been a libel.

Sheya:

Jews Don’t Own Exclusive Rights To ‘Blood Bible’ Neither Do They Want To

Michelle Malkin:

The Worst Sheriff In America

Richard Roeper:

Blame lunatic for Ariz. tragedy, not Palin or rhetoric

Hot Air:

Democrat-Communist Senator Bernie Sanders Raising Money Off Arizona Murders

Jonah Goldberg:

‘Blood Libel’ and Beyond

Lost in all of the squabbling about the use of the term “blood libel” is an under-appreciated fact. Palin’s statement yesterday was actually the most robust, unapologetic defense of vigorous democratic debate and the American system we’ve heard from any politician since Saturday, and that goes for President Obama’s speech as well. I don’t fault Obama by saying this. Obama was speaking at a memorial service (or at least that was his plan).

Palin did exactly what her detractors claimed she both must do and couldn’t do: give a grown up, mature statement. The timing was arguably ill-considered, given that it was bound to be overshadowed by the president’s remarks last night.

But such criticism is hard to take from people who demanded that she speak up and then denounced her for doing exactly that.

Likewise, the objections that she “injected herself into the story” are hard to take seriously from the same people who insisted she was the cause of the story in the first place. If she had waited a day and released her statement today, she would have been twice as vilified for re-opening the “wound” Obama the Healer had mended.

Still, the timing invited too many “who is more presidential” comparisons. I think the president was more presidential, in no small part because he is the president. Palin’s video statement was something else because she is not the president.

And the criticism that she should have turned the other cheek and not defended herself at all strikes me as beyond absurd. The woman was being accused of being a willfull co-conspirator in murder. It is just unfair and flatly dishonest to expect her not to address that.

Robert J. Avrech:

Gabrielle Gifford’s Synagogue and Liberal Blood Libels

Hot Air:

WaPo: Loughner Was A Registered Independent, Didn’t Vote This Year

Wall Street Journal:

Why the Left Lost It

The accusation that the tea parties were linked to the Tucson murders is the product of calculation and genuine belief.

Big Government:

Liberal Alan Dershowitz,Defends Sarah Palin’s Use Of The Term “Blood Libel”

The term “blood libel” has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse. Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People, its current usage is far broader.

I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report.

There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim. The fact that two of the victims are Jewish is utterly irrelevant to the propriety of using this widely used term.

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